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The sun is shining, the cows are out, the fat tyres are on the tractor and the fertiliser is going on, at last. We are greatly relieved as the back wall of the silage clamp was getting perilously close, in spite of having made a lifetime record of fodder on this farm.
Last autumn, every time I repeated the old saying “when you make a lot, you need a lot”, the younger generation would grin and you could see on their faces what they were thinking.
“Silly old fool, we’ll never use all this.” I even went out secretly, without telling the family, and bought 100 bales of hay and stored them off-farm. We are now hauling them home and the family are very grateful.
Obviously, if we hadn’t needed them, the family would never have known. There’s no point in getting older if you don’t get wiser.
Buildings
The enormous amount of money we have invested in buildings over the last five years is making life so much easier.
These comprise the 20:20 parlour with automatic identification, auto-feeder and auto-cluster remover, the three-way shedding gate and the new 140-cow cubicle shed.
But the one I am most proud of is where we roofed the old collecting yard for the cows near to calving and at one end installed two large pens 12x15ft with crush facilities overseen by CCTV linked to my mobile phone.
Every evening, any cow near calving is put in one of these pens and I am able to wake up at night and see on my mobile phone if they need assistance. Life is so much easier now.
COVID-19
The tragic unknown affecting the whole world at the moment is COVID-19. It is impossible to imagine the consequences of this terrible affliction and the government is taking firm action, but I imagine each country will have to re-write its economy, I don’t know how.
The British government was on the cusp of signing trade deals around the world to feed the nation, and has now seen panic buying, emptying supermarket shelves.
They must realise that a hungry nation is an angry nation and probably one meal away from rebellion, so we need a homegrown food supply or at least a supply from adjacent nations.
To return to old sayings, when the wind is in the northeast on 21 March, he will stay there till 21 June. Where was the wind on 21 March? And we all know what a northeast wind does to grass growth.
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